There are many circumstances where identifying an individual is of paramount concern. For example, security needs often dictate that an individual be correctly identified before the individual is permitted to perform some task, such as utilizing an automated teller machine (ATM) or entering a commercial airplane, a federal or state facility, an embassy, or other restricted area.
Traditional means of identification include signature and fingerprint identification. While useful in many circumstances, such methods, however, suffer from being intrusive because they require individuals to perform some act like signing or staining their thumb. Aside from the inconvenience of having to perform these acts, another drawback of such identification methods is that it gives the individual an opportunity to thwart the method by, for example, forging a signature.
Other identification and verification systems rely on capturing an image of a person, which is subsequently compared with images in a reference database. If there is a match between the image of the person and an image in the reference database, then the person is positively identified provided the matched image in the database is associated with a personal identifier, such as a name or social security number. If, on the other hand, there is no such match, the person is excluded from belonging to the reference database.
The capture and manipulation of image data with modern identification systems places an enormous processing burden on the system. Prior art systems have addressed this problem by using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on image data to reduce the amount of data that need to be stored in the reference database for the system to operate efficiently. An example of such a system is set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 5,164,992, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
The foregoing system operation suffers from a lack of accuracy when different images of the same object are deemed to be different objects by the recognition system. Modern system applications require accurate and timely analysis to minimize the inconvenience to people seeking access to a restricted area or attempting to perform a monetary transaction, such as at an ATM.